Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity for a Brighter Future

Environment and Energy Expertise

Search here for faculty expertise by major themes: built environment, climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, energy, food and agriculture, health and environment, society and governance, and water. Follow the faculty links for more information.

Plant, Soil, and Insect Sciences

Research focuses on genetics and how evolution works at the population, subspecies and species levels with a particular interest in butterflies. Research combines a breadth of approaches that include field ecology, laboratory experiments, molecular population genetics, statistical theory, computer simulation and mathematical modeling.

Environmental Conservation

Research interests include understanding the influence of environmental variables on growth and survival of individuals and populations; elucidating the temporal and spatial structure and function of ecosystems; and determining the best management policies given the environmental constraints on growth, survival and geographic distributions of fish.

Geosciences

Research focuses on high-resolution numerical ocean circulation models to understand the importance of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions on the strength and the stability of the climate system. Research focuses on how freshwater interacts with the deep water convection regions to cause abrupt climate change; understanding the role of changes in the Arctic freshwater budget on the sub-polar North Atlantic; parameterizing unresolved mesoscale weather activity in numerical climate models to improve the accuracy of heat and momentum fluxes at the air-sea boundary; and understanding how changes in ocean circulation and annular modes impact marine fish populations.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research focuses on resilience and sustainability of urban systems, risk assessment of civil infrastructure under extreme hazard conditions, life cycle engineering and management of civil infrastructures such as water pipelines.

Environmental Conservation

Research broadly revolves around characterizing anthropogenic impacts on aquatic ecosystems and identifying conservation strategies for effectively protecting and restoring watersheds including understanding the mechanisms by which urbanization and its associated stressors result in degraded fisheries and other ecosystems.

Biology

Research seeks to understand the genetic basis of adaptation, as well as the population and genomic context in which adaptive evolution occurs. To this effect, research interests in the lab span a range of disciplines, including population genetics, molecular evolution, evolutionary ecology, phylogeography, and evolutionary genomics, focusing on the study of loci contributing to traits of evolutionary or ecological importance and the processes governing diversification within and between closely related plant species.

Public Health and Health Sciences

Research includes developing analytic methods for characterizing the relationships among high-dimensional molecular and cellular data and measures of disease progression. Currently collaborating with investigators across multiple disciplines ranging from oncology to immunology to identify and develop appropriate techniques for analyzing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and disease outcomes for improved environmental health.